Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Armed with a computer model in 1935, one could probably have written the exact same story on California drought as appears today in the Washington Post some 80 years ago, prompted by the very similar outlier temperatures of 1934 and 2014.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Archives: 06/2008

A 2005 review article in Nature on the health impacts of climate change provided an estimate of 166,000 deaths as the annual global death toll “attributable” to climate change. This estimate, based on global vital statistics for the year 2000, was derived from a study sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) that even the study’s authors acknowledge may not “accord with the canons of empirical science” (see here). Let’s, nevertheless, accept this flawed estimate as gospel, for the sake of argument.

Where would this rank climate change in the list of global threats to mortality?

In the year 2000, there were a total of 55.8 million deaths worldwide. Thus, climate change may be responsible for less than 0.3% of all deaths globally (based on data for the year 2000). In fact, it would place climate change no higher than 13th among mortality risk factors related to food, nutrition and environment, as shown in the following table taken from pages 355-356 of the book, The Improving State of the World.

[Notably, all extreme weather events (whether due to climate change or the normally abnormal climatic variability) contribute all of 0.03% of global deaths on average. See Table 2, here.]

Specifically, climate change is easily outranked by threats such as hunger, malnutrition and other nutrition-related problems, lack of access to safe water and sanitation, indoor air pollution, malaria, urban air pollution.

With respect biodiversity and ecosystems, today the greatest threat is what it always has been – the conversion of land and water habitat to human uses, i.e., agriculture, forestry, and human habitation and infrastructure. See,e.g., here.

Climate change, contrary to claims, is clearly not the most important environmental, let alone public health, problem facing the world today.

But is it possible that in the foreseeable future, the impact of climate change on public health could outweigh that of other factors?

I’ll get to this question in subsequent blogs over the next couple of weeks, but for those who can’t wait, the answer can be found here.

At first, I thought this story must be a joke, but it apparently is true that France wants to regulate and subsidize country dancing. No further comment is necessary:

…country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control. The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls. …In a peculiarly Gallic approach to the phenomenon, French civil servants say line dancing should be submitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. This means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone who wants to give lessons or run clubs. Amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. Professionals will get 600 hours, including such subjects as line dancing techniques, “the mechanics of the human body” and the English (or at least Texan) language. They will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly. The cost of the courses, about €2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and €500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. Mr Chauveau said the regulations highlighted the French state’s obsessive desire to organise all public activity.